The study sampled 48 mostly professional, citizen Muslim Americans across Chicago and Texas

Evidence

I interviewed 48 South Asian and Arab American Muslim Americans between 2009 and 2012 about their lives since September 11th. The interviews ranged in length from forty-five minutes to three hours and took place in the greater Chicago area in Illinois and the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area in Texas. The majority of the participants were South Asian (29) compared to Arab (19). Participants consisted of 15 South Asian American women (11 Pakistani and 4 Indian), 14 South Asian American men (9 Pakistani, 4 Indian, and 1 Bengali), 10 Arab American women (8 Palestinian, 1 Egyptian, and 1 Syrian), and 9 Arab American men (8 Palestinian and 1 Lebanese). Participants’ ages ranged from twenty to seventy-one. The majority of the participants were native citizens or born in the United States (34), while a little under one-third (14) were foreign-born and were naturalized citizens. More than half were professionals with graduate degrees in medicine, law, and business. A little more than half of the woman participants wore the hijab; therefore, I was able to compare the role of religious signifiers in the lives of Muslim women. Of the 14 women interviewed who wore the hijab, only 1 also wore the jilbaab (a coat-like garment Muslim women wear over their clothes to hide their figures). None of the men I interviewed wore religious symbols, like a beard. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the jilbaab garment and clarifies that no male interviewees wore religious symbols like beards, which matters for how religious signifiers tracked across genders.